News Feature
| January 13, 2014

Moving Beyond Customer Experience To Engagement

Source: Retail Solutions Online

By Jim Roddy, Integrated Solutions For Retailers

Customer experience was one of the most discussed topics during RetailROI’s Super Saturday on Jan. 11 in New York City. In fact, the opening keynote from Jeff Roster, Research VP Global Industry for Gartner, was titled “Moving Beyond Customer Experience To Engagement.”

What’s driving retail IT spending in 2014? Roster’s main PowerPoint slide included these four headlines:

The Era of Intentional Innovation has arrived

M is for: Mobile, Marketing, Millennial

Summoning Social to Center Stage

Agility as an Archetype

It is a huge mistake for retail executives to punish innovation that leads to failure. “Failure should be encouraged,” Roster said, “but you need to fail fast. You won’t move the needle if you can’t fail.”

Roster believes innovation will be enabled by four factors: cloud, social, mobile, and Big Data. “And because retail touches Millennials the most, retail is at the center of transformational changes,” he said.

“Innovation will net out in the CMO’s world,” Roster said. “Get your CEOs on board. It’s a different time. Success looks different than it did yesterday.”

Retailers will suffer if they don’t invest significant resources into their social strategy. One retailer said, “We will do with social media in the 21st century what we did with distribution in the 20th.”

Regarding agility, Roster said, “Cross-channel, omni-channel is all about agility.” To the retailers in the room he said, “You will be spending more on agility in 2014. Congratulations.”

Super Saturday was held at the PwC Auditorium on Madison Avenue in New York City on Jan. 11, the day before NRF’s Big Show 2014. Nearly 200 retail analysts, technology executives, and retailers gathered for a day of industry knowledge sharing while supporting RetailROI, an industry group committed to helping orphans. For more information, go to www.RetailROI.org.